Two Years of Valkey

The split and the comeback

Two years after a group of former Redis contributors announced a competitive fork, it has been reported that Valkey has settled into a steady, if not headline-grabbing, rhythm. The fork was triggered by Redis moving away from the permissive BSD license to source‑available terms — the RSALv2 and SSPLv1 — and it has been reported that Redis later returned to an open license, this time the copyleft AGPL. Drama? Yes. Closure? Not exactly. The story is less about fireworks and more about the slow, stubborn work of building a project that other organizations will bet on.

What the commit metrics show

It has been reported that Valkey’s commit velocity spiked immediately after the fork — no surprise — and while that peak didn’t last, Valkey has generally sustained a slightly higher non‑merge commit rate than Redis, save for two months last year. Active contributors skew higher for Valkey too, and organizational diversity — inferred from email domains and profiles — leans in Valkey’s favor. Amazon, Aiven, Alibaba, ByteDance and Google all show up in the contributor lists; Gmail addresses remain the single largest bucket, reminding us that developers often commit under personal identities rather than corporate banners.

The human note and the limits of the data

Perhaps the most striking moment? The project’s founder, Salvatore Sanfilippo (antirez), appears to have stepped back in without fanfare, it has been reported. That matters. Founder returns are emotionally resonant and can shift momentum in unexpected ways. Still, a caveat: commits are only one lens. They don’t measure deploys, performance, or who’s actually running the software in production. So far, Valkey does not look like a fork that died on the vine — it looks more like a long game. Will that be enough to redraw the Redis landscape? Time will tell.

Sources: redmonk.com, Lobsters